The rice coast community was a small one.  Even as measured in its number of slaves it bulked only one-fourth as large, say in 1790, as the group of tobacco commonwealths or the single sugar island of Jamaica.  Nevertheless it was a community to be reckoned with.  Its people were awake to their peculiar conditions and problems; it had plenty of talented citizens to formulate policies; and it had excellent machinery for uniting public opinion.  In colonial times, plying its trade mainly with England and the West Indies, it was in little touch with its continental neighbors, and it developed a sense of separateness.  As part of a loosely administered empire its people were content in prosperity and self-government.  But in a consolidated nation of diverse and conflicting interests it would be likely on occasion to assert its own will and resist unitedly anything savoring of coercion.  In a double sense it was of the southern South.

CHAPTER VI

THE NORTHERN COLONIES

Had any American colony been kept wholly out of touch with both Indians and negroes, the history of slavery therein would quite surely have been a blank.  But this was the case nowhere.  A certain number of Indians were enslaved in nearly every settlement as a means of disposing of captives taken in war; and negro slaves were imported into every prosperous colony as a mere incident of its prosperity.  Among the Quakers the extent of slaveholding was kept small partly, or perhaps mainly, by scruples of conscience; in virtually all other cases the scale was determined by industrial conditions.  Here the plantation system flourished and slaves were many; there the climate prevented profits from crude gang labor in farming, and slaves were few.

The nature and causes of the contrast will appear from comparing the careers of two Puritan colonies launched at the same time but separated by some thirty degrees of north latitude.  The one was planted on the island of Old Providence lying off the coast of Nicaragua, the other was on the shores of Massachusetts bay.  The founders of Old Providence were a score of Puritan dignitaries, including the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, and John Pym, incorporated into the Westminster Company in 1630 with a combined purpose of erecting a Puritanic haven and gaining profits for the investors.  The soil of the island was known to be fertile, the nearby Spanish Main would yield booty to privateers, and a Puritan government would maintain orthodoxy.  These enticements were laid before John Winthrop and his companions; and when they proved steadfast in the choice of New England, several hundred others of their general sort embraced the tropical Providence alternative.  Equipped as it was with all the apparatus of a “New England Canaan,” the founders anticipated a far greater career than seemed likely of achievement in Massachusetts.  Prosperity came at once in the form of good crops